Engdahl – “Seeds of Destruction” – excellent review

2008-01-06

Richard Moore

Original source URL:
http://www.globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=va&aid=7716

"Seeds of Destruction, The Hidden Agenda of Genetic Manipulation"
Review of F. William Engdahl's Book

By Stephen Lendman

Global Research, January 2, 2008

Today, we're all lab rats in an uncontrolled, unregulated mass human experiment 
the results of which are unknown.  Once GM seeds are introduced to an area, the 
genie is out of the bottle for keeps.

Reviewing F. William Engdahl's "Seeds of Destruction" - by Stephen Lendman (Part
I)

Bill Engdahl is a leading researcher, economist and analyst of the New World 
Order who's written on issues of energy, politics and economics for over 30 
years. He contributes regularly to publications like Japan's Nihon Keizai 
Shimbun, Foresight magazine, Grant's Investor.com, European Banker and Business 
Banker International. He's also a frequent speaker at geopolitical, economic and
energy related international conferences and is a distinguished Research 
Associate of the Centre for Research on Globalization where he's a regular 
contributor.

Engdahl also wrote two important books - "A Century of War: Anglo-American Oil 
Politics and the New World Order" in 2004. It's an essential history of 
geopolitics and the importance of oil. Engdahl explains that America's post-WW 
II dominance rests on two pillars and one commodity - unchallengeable military 
power and the dollar as the world's reserve currency combined with the quest to 
control global oil and other energy resources.

Engdahl's newest book is just out from  Global Research: "Seeds of Destruction: 
The Hidden Agenda of Genetic Manipulation" and subject of this review. It's the 
diabolical story of how Washington and four Anglo-American agribusiness giants 
plan world domination by patenting life forms to gain worldwide control of our 
food supply and why that prospect is chilling. The book's compelling contents 
are reviewed below in-depth so readers will know the type future Henry Kissinger
had in mind in 1970 when he said: "Control oil and you control nations; control 
food and you control the people."

Remember also, this cabal is one of many interconnected ones with fearsome power
and ruthless intent to use it - Big Banks controlling the Federal Reserve and 
our money, Big Oil our world energy resources, Big Media our information, Big 
Pharma our health, Big Technology our state-of-the-art everything and watching 
us, Big Defense our wars, Big Pentagon waging them, and other corporate 
predators exploiting our lives for profit. Engdahl's book focuses brilliantly on
one of them. To fully cover its vital contents, this review will be in three 
parts for more detail and to make it easily digestible.

Part I of "Seeds of Destruction"

In 2003, Jeffrey Smith's "Seeds of Deception" was published. It exposed the 
dangers of untested and unregulated genetically engineered foods most people eat
every day with no knowledge of the potential health risks. Efforts to inform the
public have been quashed, reliable science has been buried, and consider what 
happened to two distinguished scientists.

One was Ignatio Chapela, a microbial ecologist at the University of California, 
Berkeley. In September, 2001, he was invited to a carefully staged meeting with 
Fernando Ortiz Monasterio, Mexico's Director of the Commission of Biosafety in 
Mexico City. The experience left Chapela shaken and angry as he explained. 
Monasterio attacked him for over an hour. "First he trashed me. He let me know 
how damaging to the country and how problematic my information was to be."

Chapela referred to what he and a UC Berkeley graduate student, David Quist, 
discovered in 2000 about genetically engineered contamination of Mexican corn in
violation of a government ban on these crops in 1998. Corn is sacred in Mexico, 
the country is home to hundreds of indigenous varieties that crossbreed 
naturally, and GM contamination is permanent and unthinkable - but it happened 
by design.

Chapela and Quist tested corn varieties in more than a dozen state of Oaxaca 
communities and discovered 6% of the plants contaminated with GM corn. Oaxaca is
in the country's far South so Chapela knew if contamination spread there, it was
widespread throughout Mexico. It's unavoidable because NAFTA allows imported US 
corn with 30% of it at the time genetically modified. Now it's heading for 
nearly double that amount, and if not contained, it soon could be all of it.

The prestigious journal Nature agreed to publish Chapela's findings, Monasterio 
wanted them quashed, but Chapela refused to comply. As a result, he was 
intimidated not to do it and threatened with being held responsible for all 
damages to Mexican agriculture and its economy.

He went ahead, nonetheless, and when his article appeared in the publication on 
November 29, 2001 the smear campaign against him began and intensified. It was 
later learned that Monsanto was behind it, and the Washington-based Bivings 
Group PR firm was hired to discredit his findings and get them retracted.

It worked because the campaign didn't focus on Chapela's contamination 
discovery, but on a second research conclusion even more serious. He learned the
contaminated GM corn had as many as eight fragments of the CaMV promoter that 
creates an unstable "hotspot." It can cause plant genes to fragment, scatter 
throughout the plant's genome, and, if proved conclusively, would wreck efforts 
to introduce GM crops in the country. Without further evidence, there was still 
room for doubt if the second finding was valid, however, and the anti-Chapela 
campaign hammered him on it.

Because of the pressure, Nature took an unprecedented action in its 133 year 
history. It upheld Chapela's central finding but retracted the other one. That 
was all it took, and the major media pounced on it. They denounced Chapela's 
incompetence and tried to discredit everything he learned including his verified
findings. They weren't reported, his vilification was highlighted, and Monsanto 
and the Mexican government scored a big victory.

Ironically, on April 18, 2002, two weeks after Nature's partial retraction, the 
Mexican government announced there was massive genetic contamination of 
traditional corn varieties in Oaxaca and the neighboring state of Puebla. It was
horrifying as up to 95% of tested crops were genetically polluted and "at a 
speed never before predicted." The news made headlines in Europe and Mexico. It 
was ignored in the US and Canada.

The fallout for Chapela was UC Berkeley denied him tenure in 2003 because of his
article and for criticizing university ties to the biotech industry. He then 
filed suit in April, 2004 asking remuneration for lost wages, earnings and 
benefits, compensatory damages for humiliation, mental anguish, emotional 
distress and coverage of attorney fees and costs for his action. He won in May, 
2005 but not in court when the university reversed its decision, granted him 
tenure and agreed to include retroactive pay back to 2003. The damage, however, 
was done and is an example of what's at stake when anyone dares challenge a 
powerful company like Monsanto.

The other man attacked was the world's leading lectins and plant genetic 
modification expert, UK-based Arpad Pusztai. He was vilified and fired from his 
research position at Scotland's Rowett Research Institute for publishing 
industry-unfriendly data he was commissioned to produce on the safety of GMO 
foods.

His Rowett Research study was the first ever independent one conducted on them 
anywhere. He undertook it believing in their promise but became alarmed by his 
findings. The Clinton and Blair governments were determined to suppress them 
because Washington was spending billions promoting GMO crops and a future 
biotech revolution. It wasn't about to let even the world's foremost expert in 
the field derail the effort. His results were startling and consider the 
implications for humans eating genetically engineered foods.

Rats fed GMO potatoes had smaller livers, hearts, testicles and brains, damaged 
immune systems, and showed structural changes in their white blood cells making 
them more vulnerable to infection and disease compared to other rats fed non-GMO
potatoes. It got worse. Thymus and spleen damage showed up; enlarged tissues, 
including the pancreas and intestines; and there were cases of liver atrophy as 
well as significant proliferation of stomach and intestines cells that could be 
a sign of greater future risk of cancer. Equally alarming - this all happened 
after 10 days of testing, and the changes persisted after 110 days that's the 
human equivalent of 10 years.

GM foods today saturate our diet. Over 80% of all supermarket processed foods 
contain them. Others include grains like rice, corn and wheat; legumes like 
soybeans and soy products; vegetable oils; soft drinks; salad dressings; 
vegetables and fruits; dairy products including eggs; meat and other animal 
products; and even infant formula plus a vast array of hidden additives and 
ingredients in processed foods (like in tomato sauce, ice cream and peanut 
butter). They're unrevealed to consumers because labeling is prohibited yet the 
more of them we eat, the greater the potential threat to our health.

Today, we're all lab rats in an uncontrolled, unregulated mass human experiment 
the results of which are unknown. The risks from it are beyond measure, it will 
take many years to learn them, and when they're finally revealed it will be too 
late to reverse the damage if it's proved GM products harm human health as 
independent experts strongly believe. Once GM seeds are introduced to an area, 
the genie is out of the bottle for keeps.

Despite the enormous risks, however, Washington and growing numbers of 
governments around the world in parts of Europe, Asia, Latin America and Africa 
now allow these products to be grown in their soil or imported. They're produced
and sold to consumers because agribusiness giants like Monsanto, DuPont, Dow 
AgriSciences and Cargill have enormous clout to demand it and a potent partner 
supporting them - the US government and its agencies, including the Departments 
of Agriculture and State, FDA, EPA and even the defense establishment. World 
Trade Organization (WTO) Trade-Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights 
(TRIPS) patent rules also back them along with industry-friendly WTO rulings 
like the February 7, 2006 one.

It favored a US challenge against European GMO regulatory policies in spite of 
strong consumer sentiment against these foods and ingredients on the continent. 
It also violated the Biosafety Protocol that should let nations regulate these 
products in the public interest, but it doesn't because WTO trade rules 
sabotaged it. Nonetheless, anti-GMO activism persists, consumers still have a 
say, and there are hundreds of GMO-free zones around the world, including in the
US. That and more is needed to take on the agribusiness giants that so far have 
everything going their way.

In "Seeds of Deception," Jeffrey Smith did a masterful job explaining the 
dangers of GM foods and ingredients. Engdahl explains them as well but goes much
further brilliantly in his blockbuster book on this topic. It's the story of a 
powerful family and a "small socio-political American elite (that) seeks to 
establish control over the very basis of human survival" - future life through 
the food we eat. The book's introduction says it "reads (like) a crime story." 
It's also a nightmare but one that's very real and threatening.

This review covers the book in-depth because of its importance. It's an 
extraordinary work that "reveals a diabolical World of profit-driven political 
intrigue (and) government corruption and coercion" that's part of a decades-long
global scheme for total world dominance. The book deserves vast exposure and 
must be read in full for the whole disturbing story. It's hoped the material 
below will encourage readers to do it in their own self-interest and to marshal 
mass consumer actions to place food safety above corporate profits.

Engdahl's book supplies the ammunition to do it and is also a sequel to his 
earlier one on war, oil politics and The New World Order and follows naturally 
from it. It covers the roots of the strategy to control "global food security" 
that goes back to the 1930s and the plans of a handful of American families to 
preserve their wealth and power. But it centers on one in particular that above 
the others "came to symbolize the hubris and arrogance of the emerging American 
century" that blossomed post-WW II. Its patriarch began in oil and then 
dominated it in his powerful Oil Trust. It was only the beginning as the family 
expanded into "education of youth, medicine and psychology," US foreign policy, 
and "the very science of life itself, biology, and its applications" in plants 
and agriculture.

The family's name is Rockefeller. The patriarch was John D., and four powerful 
later-generation brothers followed him - David, Nelson, Laurance, and John D. 
III. Engdahl says the GMO story covers "the evolution of power in the hands of 
an elite (led by this family), determined (above all) to bring the entire world 
under their sway." They and other elites already control most of it, including 
the nation's energy, the US Federal Reserve, and other key world central banks. 
Today, three brothers are gone, David alone remains, and he's still a force at 
age 92 although he no longer runs the family bank, JP Morgan Chase. He's active 
in family enterprises, however, including the Rockefeller Foundation to be 
discussed in Part II of this review.

Click to order William Engdahl's

Seeds of Destruction,
The Hidden Agenda of Genetic Manipulation

F. William Engdahl is a leading analyst of the New World Order, author of the 
best-selling book on oil and geopolitics, A Century of War: Anglo-American 
Politics and the New World Order,¹ His writings have been translated into more 
than a dozen languages.

Reviews of Engdahl's Seeds of Destruction

What is so frightening about Engdahl's vision of the world is that it is so 
real. Although our civilization has been built on humanistic ideals, in this new
age of "free markets", everything-- science, commerce, agriculture and even 
seeds-- have become weapons in the hands of a few global corporation barons and 
their political fellow travelers. To achieve world domination, they no longer 
rely on bayonet-wielding soldiers. All they need is to control food production.

(Dr. Arpad Pusztai, biochemist, formerly of the Rowett Research Institute 
Institute, Scotland)

If you want to learn about the socio-political agenda --why biotech corporations
insist on spreading GMO seeds around the World-- you should read this carefully 
researched book. You will learn how these corporations want to achieve control 
over all mankind, and why we must resist... (Marijan Jost, Professor of 
Genetics, Krizevci, Croatia)

The book reads like a murder mystery of an incredible dimension, in which four 
giant Anglo-American agribusiness conglomerates have no hesitation to use GMO to
gain control over our very means of subsistence...

(Anton Moser, Professor of Biotechnology, Graz, Austria).


CLICK to order William F. Engdahl's book directly from Global Research

Seeds of Destruction,
The Hidden Agenda of Genetic Manipulation
Global Research Articles by F. William Engdahl


Stephen Lendman is Research Associate of the Centre for Research on 
Globalization. He lives in Chicago and can be reached at 
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Also visit his blog site at www.sjlendman.blogspot.com and listen to The Steve 
Lendman News and Information Hour on www.TheMicroEffect.com Mondays at noon US 
Central time.

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